Earl Warren

A Register of His Papers in the Library of Congress

Prepared by Allan J. Teichroew
Revised by Melinda K. Friend

Manuscript Division, Library of Congress

Washington, D.C.

2000

Contact information: http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/mss/address.html

Finding aid encoded by Library of Congress Manuscript Division, 2000

Finding aid URL: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/eadmss.ms000012

Latest revision: 2004-11-16

Table of Contents

Collection Summary

Selected Search Terms

Names:

Subjects:

Occupation:

Administrative Information

Provenance:

Processing History:

Copyright Status:

Security Classified Documents:

Preferred Citation:

Related Material

Biographical Note

Scope and Content Note

Organization of the Papers

Description of Series

Container List

Collection Summary

Selected Search Terms

The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the Library's online catalog. They are grouped by name of person or organization, by subject or location, and by occupation and listed alphabetically therein.

Administrative Information

The papers of Earl Warren, lawyer, attorney general and governor of California, and chief justice of the United States, were given to the Library of Congress by Warren in 1974.

The papers of Earl Warren were arranged and described in 1984; an earlier version of this register was published in 1985, Earl Warren: A Register of His Papers in the Library of Congress. Washington, D.C.: Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. This description was revised in 2000.

Copyright in the unpublished writings of Earl Warren in these papers and in other collections of papers in the custody of the Library of Congress has been dedicated to the public.

Government regulations control the use of security classified material in this collection. Manuscript Division staff can furnish information concerning access to and use of classified items.

Researchers wishing to cite this collection should include the following information: Container number, Earl Warren Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Related Material

Other papers of Earl Warren which relate chiefly to his early years and public service in California are held by the California State Archives in Sacramento.

Biographical Note

Scope and Content Note

The papers of Earl Warren (1891-1974) span the years 1864 to 1974, with the bulk of the items concentrated in the period after 1953, when Warren became chief justice of the United States. The collection relates to private and public matters and includes six series. The Supreme Court File and the Lower Courts File series are further divided into subseries of various legal and functional categories containing Supreme Court opinions, docket books, conference lists and bench memoranda, Judicial Conference records, and correspondence with associate justices and federal district judges, plus numerous other records and papers concerning Warren's sixteen years on the Court. The Speeches and Writings series dates from 1942 when Warren ran for governor of California. Additional series include a Personal File, an Organizations File treating Warren's professional associations outside the Court, and an Oversize series containing scrapbooks documenting his Supreme Court years.

Warren rose from prosecutor in Alameda County, California, to state attorney general and then governor of California before attaining national recognition as Thomas E. Dewey's running mate in the presidential election of 1948. Four years later he sought nomination on the Republican ticket for president. That campaign, bitterly contested in the primaries between front-runners Dwight D. Eisenhower and Robert A. Taft, positioned Warren to succeed Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson. His first achievement was guiding the Supreme Court towards the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision. Thereafter came the sweeping changes augured by other "Warren Court" opinions, not only in the controversial area of race relations and civil rights but also in the realms of criminal procedure, the rights of indigent defendants, legislative reapportionment, freedom of speech and unpopular political affiliation, pornography, and religious expression in public schools.

The Personal File contains private and public correspondence as well as subject files and office records. Dating from the nineteenth century only because of a lone ancestral item sent to Warren by a distant relative, this series, like virtually the entire collection, begins basically in 1953. There is much personal material such as dinner invitations, family exchanges, holiday greetings, and political reminiscences and musings, but the focus is principally on Warren's service as chief justice. Various files treat his many trips abroad, daily calendars of his scheduled activities on and off the Court, correspondence regarding social occasions with foreign dignitaries, personal correspondence with the four presidents during whose terms he served, and photographs of Warren, his family, and his associates. Warren received numerous communications from politicians, journalists, legal scholars, entertainment leaders, and ordinary people across the country writing about decisions of the Court or important national and international events. Some of these letters are classified according to such topical categories as congratulations or regrets on eventful personal developments, but the majority can be found in alphabetical files under the writer's name.

The Supreme Court File covers nearly every operational and administrative aspect of the Warren Court, from the chief justice's jurisdiction over the offices of the clerk, the marshal, and the reporter to his recommendations about air-conditioning in the courtroom. Similar materials exist for the lower federal courts, with these files being generally intact from the mid-1940s and especially rich in Judicial Conference holdings. Located in the latter subseries are the basic data of the federal legal structure for the period. There are committee deliberations on appropriations, administrative procedure, legal ethics, personnel, habeas corpus, retirement of judges, bankruptcy rules, and congressional legislation as it affected the court system. Another subseries in the Lower Courts File consists of Warren's papers and records pertaining to judges. In this section are assignment folders, topical files, and correspondence which Warren exchanged with district court judges and others between 1953 and 1970. Among those whose correspondence appears frequently are Judges John Biggs, Jr., Charles Edward Clark, Irving R. Kaufman, John Johnston Parker, Orie Leon Phillips, and E. Barrett Prettyman.

The Supreme Court opinion files are organized as Warren's office arranged them according to whether an opinion was written by Warren or an associate justice or decided per curiam without an elaborate opinion. Warren's opinions include drafts from the first handwritten one through the final printed version. The opinion files as a whole contain memoranda exchanged between Warren and the other justices, briefs they circulated, background material they used or shared, and an occasional outside letter of comment about the cases. Also important is the separate correspondence file of letters between Warren and the associate justices. Supplemental to the justices' notes in the case files themselves, this subseries mixes everything from personal news and office trivia with discussions about the legal issues of the day and is an invaluable guide to the Court's collective mind and makeup, amounting when combined with the annotated conference lists, docket books, and bench memoranda, to a comprehensive account of Warren Court developments.

The Speeches and Writings file is the only segment of these papers to deal firsthand with Warren's career as governor and politician. Consisting mostly of transcripts or carbons rather than drafts or actual presentation copies, the speeches before 1953 feature three California gubernatorial campaigns and Warren's unsuccessful attempt to be vice president in 1948 and the Republican nominee for president in 1952. Those after 1953 include a greater variety of public appearances and contain manuscripts of talks in every stage of preparation as well as correspondence about the event and its impact.

Another series with information about Warren's public and professional activities outside the courtroom is the Organizations File, which documents his connections with law schools, legal societies, philanthropic agencies, his service as an ex officio member on the boards of the Smithsonian Institution, and the Harry S. Truman Library, and the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which became known as the Warren Commission. The latter file consists mainly of correspondence reflecting the public's response to the findings of the Warren Commission.

Prominent and frequent correspondents include Warren's fellow justices on the Supreme Court: Hugo LaFayette Black, William J. Brennan, Harold H. Burton, Tom C. Clark, William O. Douglas, Abe Fortas, Felix Frankfurter, Arthur J. Goldberg, John M. Harlan, Robert Houghwout Jackson, Thurgood Marshall, Sherman A. Minton, Stanley Forman Reed, Potter Stewart, Byron R. White, and Charles Evans Whittaker. Important also are letters he received from presidents Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon. Other individuals whose names appear frequently in the collection are Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, Warren E. Burger, Edwin L. Carty, Louis Finkelstein, Paul Abraham Freund, Walter P. Jones, Goodwin Knight, Thomas H. Kuchel, Warren Olney III, Thomas M. Storke, and Benjamin Harrison Swig.

Organization of the Papers

The collection is arranged in seven series:

• Personal File, 1864-1974
• Supreme Court File, 1930-1974, n.d.
• Lower Courts File, 1942-1974
• Organizations File, 1939-1974
• Speeches and Writings, 1942-1974
• Oversize, 1953-1969
• Classified, 1959-1967

Description of Series

Container List